Week #9: Renaming the Book and Changing the Funnel

I’m sure the #1 question you’re going to ask me after reading the title of this post is “why in the world would you change the name of your book, Russell?!”

Well, it’s still called “Expert Secrets” but I did change the subtitle.

When I was writing this book I focused on the fact that I wanted to create a mass movement. So the subtitle was “The Underground Playbook for Creating a Mass Movement of People Who Will Pay You for Your Advice…”

You can see the original cover here:

That message is still true and relevant. But as I was doing dozens of Facebook Lives over the last few weeks I found that message doesn’t quite resonate with the masses.

Most people don’t want to create a mass movement.

What they want is to find their voice, build a tribe, and, in their own little way, change the world.

In fact, a couple days before the book launch, I met a guy who is famous for writing headlines. All he does all day long is write headlines for different products. He charged $100 per headline. I thought “what the heck? Let’s see if he can come up with a better headline than I have on this page.” So I sent him some money.

A few hours later he sent me back dozens of headlines. This is the one I loved the most that became the headline on the landing page:

“Find Your Message. Build Your Tribe. Change the World.”

As I started talking to people, that was the message that resonated.

We were about to put in an order for 60,000 books from our publisher. I called them up and said “Please stop! We need to change the title on the cover.”

They told me that was crazy but I insisted. “Please make this change. It’s really important and I think it will help book sales and also help people connect with the book more.”

So we changed it. Now you can see the picture of the new book cover:

We’ve also started shipping out the books. In fact, on Facebook and Instagram, they’re tons of people posting pictures of receiving the book. Here are a few pictures:

Shipping the Black Box

First off, I’m not the best in the world at supply chain management. For me to create the Black Box, I had to get about 30 different things from 5 different vendors. While I got some of the stuff in time, some of it didn’t come in time. It took forever to get it all printed, ordered and shipped to the right place.

In fact, Matt Frew over at Ship Zoom had, not only his entire company, but all his friends and family members up all weekend long stuffing and shipping Black Boxes. I think they sent out about 15,000 of them last weekend!

The Black Boxes should start to hit people’s mailboxes this weekend.

If you need to ship anything Matt Frew is the man. You should Ship Zoom because they “make ship happen.”

Here are some pictures of them stuffing the boxes and shipping them out:

The “Stick Strategy”

I learned this initially from Joe Polish and Alex Mandossian from a course they had called “Stick Strategies.”

When people buy your product, they are at the peak of emotional excitement. But by time it shows up on their doorstep, they’ve lost that excitement. That’s when a lot of refunds come due to buyer’s remorse.

I wanted to get them back into a state of excitement. So on every box there’s this big huge sign that says

“STOP! Don’t open this box until you’ve heard an
important message about Expert Secrets from Russell Brunson.
Text the word ‘Expert’ to the number below.”

So they text that word and they get this video back from me:

My goal was to get them re-excited about the decision they initially made. That way, they’d be more likely to read the book and more likely to love it.

Fixing a Dropping Cart Value

One other big thing that happened…

I’ve been happy with the funnel but our average cart value has been dropping.

This was the average cart value the week we launched:
This was the ACV the following week:

Now, this partially due to the fact that we’re moving from our hot audience down to our warm audience, so that’s to be expected.

Also, many people are buying multiple copies. In fact we have two people who bought over a hundred copies thanks to one affiliate bribing people to buy multiple copies through his affiliate link. (Which, by the way, is against our terms of service and will not be rewarded towards the affiliate prize.)

Other people just wanted to funnel hack us and bought multiple times. Or they just wanted to get different bonuses from different affiliates.

With that said, our average cart value has dropped some and we wanted to figure out how to get it back up.

So last week, we were at a cabin in Sundance working on a new video for the ClickFunnels home page (more on that in a future episode.) While we were there, we decided we needed to change the funnel. We shifted the order form bump copy. We shifted the way the upsells were structured and a whole bunch of other things.

As I was trying to figure out how to structure one of the upsells, I had this idea…

We ran into the backyard, moved the camping table and chairs from the back patio, and set up some cameras. While it was raining on me, I told a heartfelt story about a special offer I created. I honestly think this is probably the best thing they could buy because it has to do with them finding their own voice and becoming who they are. I made a good offer and we created the video for it.

That night, we stayed up until about 1 o’clock in the morning getting a new funnel designed. Then we launched it.

We watched over the next five or six days as we increased our average cart value by about $7 or $8… which is a huge win in my books. So I’m happy, especially considering that we’re moving away from our hot and warm traffic to colder traffic.

So the new funnel is doing really well. In a future episode, I’ll break down what it all looks like.

Big News for Affiliates

The last thing I want to share is that this week we’ll be shifting how we pay our affiliate commissions.

So far, we’ve been paying out 40% of every sale that’s happening in the funnel. Now we’re transitioning to the front-end funnel and we’re going to pay out a flat $20 for every book they give away.

That means there’s no risk on the affiliates. They give away a book, they get $20.
Last time we did this, we sold twice as many books the last week of our launch as we did the first three weeks. I’m hoping we’ll have similar results this time out.

And don’t worry… affiliates will still get paid our typical affiliate commissions on all backend sales. The $20 just has to do with the front-end funnel.

So that’s the process we’re going to use to hopefully get us to 50,000 copies and beyond.

That’s all this week from the Expert Secrets Launch Center. I hope you got a copy of your book. If you haven’t, go to ExpertSecrets.com to discover how you can find your voice, build a tribe, and change the world.

Who is Russell Brunson?

Over the past 10 years, Russell has built a following of over a million entrepreneurs, sold hundreds of thousands of copies of his books, popularized the concept of sales funnels, and co-founded a software company called ClickFunnels that helps tens of thousands of entrepreneurs quickly get their message out to the marketplace.